Thought Leadership

For decades, the story of Welsh football was defined by moments of individual brilliance and near misses. Much of our success was reliant on a single generation of elite talent rather than a sustainable system. But as we have seen across the global game, hope is not a strategy. To secure our future, the Football Association of Wales (FAW)  had to move away from a "passive" model, where we simply accepted the players the club system produced, to a proactive high-performance ar

In football culture, the backward pass suffers from a perception problem. To the fan in the stand, playing the ball away from the opposition’s goal is often seen as negative, passive, or a lack of ambition. A familiar complaint heard in stadiums is that a team is simply playing sideways or backwards rather than attacking. But in a high-performance environment, we do not judge actions by direction; we judge them by intent. When we analyse the data from Europe’s elite — specifi

For a generation of coaches, the tactical holy grail was zone 14. This golden square located centrally just outside the penalty area was viewed as the most fertile ground for creativity. The logic was simple: if you could find a playmaker in this pocket, you had the maximum number of passing angles to unlock a defence. However, the game evolves. As defensive structures became more compact and holding midfielders were deployed specifically to patrol this zone, elite teams had